2 Long-Term Approaches To Increase User Activation

User activation aka getting a new user to the "I see, I get it!" point, is one the most important leading indicators of retention and generally ends up being the deciding factor between life or death for early-stage products...

or

...between hyper or stutter growth mature products who suddenly find themselves operating in a hyper-competitive market.

No wonder why product-minded growth professionals end up giving it a huge chunk of their focus. Below are some long-term-friendly approaches I have found to be effective (like any advice, please pick & apply based on your exact product context) :

Note : The reason I specifically call these "long-term" is because there are a ton of short-term approaches (deep-discounts, UX shortcuts....) to move your activation metric which are perhaps okay to boost your activation process but not really to base your core strategy on.

#1 :Ensure that your product positioning makes people want to actively use you.

This stems from YC's famous "Build something people want" motto.

The core thesis here being that ideally the people visiting your product should be "dying" to get activated instead of the product trying to "push" them through the activation journey.

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